How Do You Know When Your Website's Good Enough?

One thing I have discovered as I have become more aware of the benefits of a user-friendly website is how applying your user-friendly website strategy can throw up some interesting design issues.

Some user-friendly features are easy to achieve - like making sure your logo links back to the homepage, so visitors know they can easily and confidently get back to a familiar point on your website.

However, some website features have a series of alternatives, all with plus and minus points. Perhaps something a bit more complicated, like an online reservation system. Or product selection "wizards". When you need to do something slightly more complicated or non-standard, often things aren't so clear cut then.

Which design alternative do you choose?

Can You Ever Please All the People All the Time?

What do you do when you have different groups of visitors with different thoughts, feelings and opinions? What if  there's no consensus and each group has a different "favourite"?

You're left with the unpleasant decision of choosing which group of visitors you want to inconvenience. Once you become passionate about creating fantastic user experiences for your visitors, this decision becomes tricker.

Of course, testing out the site alternatives with your visitors is an option, which helps you pick the most profitable strategy, but no amount of testing will ever create an a perfect system, ideally suited to all visitors, all of the time.

Here's an example...

I have been helping a company with one of their website applications. It's a great app, that operates a bit like iGoogle, where people can add and  customise boxes of real-time information to a type of "homepage".

The question the client asked me to study is:

"Do visitors understand what our news webpage is for and how to customise it?"

 During my study:

• Half the participants said the instructional sentence saying you can "customise the page" should be a bold visual style. It was too "plain" and they "missed it".
   
• The other half said having a prominient instructional sentence made them skip over it, thinking it was a banner advert and "rude", and it should be quite plain and "in-keeping" with the rest of the page style for them to glance at it.

So what style would you apply to the instructions to keep everyone happy? A bold style, a plainer style or a series of permutations of slightly bolder styles over several user-tests?

So What's the Answer?

No matter how hard we strive to make our website a delight to our customers, I think back to the old saying "you can't please all of the people all of the time".  Websites are no exception.

At this time, I tend to look at the commercial realities. Sometimes deadlines, budgets and a choice of "equally satisfactory" alternatives force you to make a decision. After all, your website is not an exercise in "perfection". Rather, it's an exercise in coming up with a profitable online presence for your business.

Spending a very long time perfecting your website for all your visitors all the time, is not a good business decision - your website is primarily a business tool, where you avoid alienating your customers and visitors needlessly. Sometimes compromise is inevitable. Sometimes you will confuse or irritate some of your online customers. Sometimes, all you can do is minimise the problems as best you can. That's life.

Conclusion

I think paying attention to customer-focused design strategies,  user experience and usability are fantastic ways of generating more business, but sometimes the commercial pressures mean you'll  seldom launch a site or a website feature that is "absolutely 100% perfect", but you can always launch a site that's "perfectly good".

Yes, strive to continually improve your site and make it a popular site that your present and future customers enjoy visiting, but don't let striving for "100% perfectionism" cause damaging delays to improving your company's bottom-line now.